Every journalist these days knows in their bones that “you cannot libel the dead”. All the same, Oxford antiquarian, journalist, historian — call him what you will — Anthony Wood, was done for saying rude things about a dead person all right.

A new and beautifully produced book edited by Nicolas K. Kiessling, The Life of Anthony Wood In His Own Words, published by the Bodleian Library, at £35 — the first modern critical edition of Wood’s text — documents exactly what Wood was doing in early August 1693: getting himself out of town fast, having been banished from the university and fined £40, the equivalent of a year’s earnings.

His crime? To suggest that the first Earl of Clarendon, who had died in exile in France some 18 years previously in 1674, had been corrupt.

Already in the previous year, on August 24, 1692, to be precise, Wood had posed the question to himself in his diary as to whether or not he might have libelled the old earl. And sure enough, and unfortunately for him, the young and very much alive second earl decided that he had — and, of course, he was rich and powerful enough to hit Wood where it hurt: he sued and won.

The money he won, incidentally, was used to commission the statues still standing in the three niches on the entrance archway to the Oxford Botanic Garden, formerly called the Physic Garden, which had been established there by the Treasurer to Charles II, the Earl of Danby.

Specifically, the two libels of which he was found guilty by the University’s Vice-Chancellor’s Court were, first, that a certain David Jenkyns had not become a judge because he had failed to bribe Clarendon, England’s Lord Chancellor and Chancellor of Oxford University; second, that someone called John Glynne did indeed obtain advancement through Clarendon’s influence.

Wood wrote of Glynne: “After the restauration [sic] of King Charles 2. he was made his eldest Serjeant at law, by the corrupt dealing of the then Lord Chancellor.”

It seems that not until the Libel Act of 1843 was it established that, by and large, you can say what you like about the dead.

But here the case of another famous Oxford man, Prime Minister William Gladstone and sometime MP (or burgess) for Oxford University calls even that dictum into question.

Famously, Mr Gladstone liked to visit prostitutes. However it was claimed that he did so in order to ‘save’ them rather than avail himself of their services. In 1927, though, long after his death in 1898, author Peter Wright suggested otherwise. Gladstone’s family called him a liar. Wright sued — and lost.

But back to poor old Mr Wood. What an extraordinary life he led. He was born on December 17, 1632, in Postmasters’ Hall in Merton Street, across the road from Merton College, and died there on December 17, 1695. Mr Kiessling writes in the introduction to his book that Wood was an undistinguished undergraduate at Merton College and his brother, a fellow of Merton, saw a rather grim future for him. His mother was unimpressed by him too and he records in his diary how she would “several times forsooth propose to me the trade of a Tinner or Tin-man or a man that makes Kitchen-ware”.

But all that changed in 1656 when a copy of The Antiquities of Warwickshire by William Dugdale came to the Bodleian and he suddenly discovered his vocation. He wrote later: “My pen cannot enough describe how A. Wood’s tender affections, and insatiable desire for knowledg [sic], were ravish’d and melted downe by the reading of that book.”

In due course, thanks to the power of his pen, he became one of the most feared men in Oxford — so determined was he to write the truth and nothing but the truth as he saw it. Famously, he fell out with the Dean of Christ Church, Dr Fell, who altered the text in the Latin translation of his History of the University. He even punched the unfortunate translator on the nose!